Kinda annoyed with the PatRanger dumbassery of interfering with the Ganglar fight instead of letting them destroy each other. It barely makes sense when they interfere with the LupinRangers fighting the Ganglars. Buuuuut.... you get a point back for Tsukasa pointing out that working together makes more sense than not.

LOL, when the PatRangers show up to help LupinRed, and he looks at all of them, Keiichirou won't even turn his head. Kei-chan so tsuntsun.

Oh my, another CGI monstrosity. I mean, it looks well enough, but it kind of sucks that's all animation since the actual thing is too unwieldy to exist in reality.

I for one have said repeatedly that the vs. aspect has been getting drawn out for much too long. And I still feel that's the case. So it's exciting to see the two teams come together, however brief it is. It means that the single biggest plot thread of the series is finally progressing, albeit half-way in. Lupin vs. Pat started becoming filler at some point, so when the two work together, it means the story gets more opportunities to move forward.

And I like that it was Tsukasa who realized that the Pats needed to help the Lupins, rather than the bridge being Noel. That would have also been logical, but Noel's true alliances are still unclear, and I don't feel like either team would have gone with it had it been Noel's idea. Whereas Tsukasa is the smart one - so it's an idea that makes sense coming from her - plus she doesn't hold Keiichirou's not-unearned grudge.

If I have any disappointments, it's that the Status Gold mystery wasn't much of a mystery. The code just being longer makes sense for a safe - using 2 codebreakers less so - but it's also very straightforward. I was hoping for there to be more meaning to it. Though I suppose we still need to find out how one gets a gold safe and why (e.g. why doesn't everyone just have one?).

I also thought it interesting that Raimon's collection piece "doesn't work on" the Iceman. Which assuming the nuance on the translation is correct here, means that freezer-boy could inflict wounds upon Raimon that he couldn't heal from. So what kind of power does Frosty have such that it overrides a collection piece in such an important manner?

Oh my, another CGI monstrosity. I mean, it looks well enough, but it kind of sucks that's all animation since the actual thing is too unwieldy to exist in reality.

My thoughts as well. I mean we all knew that Cluster Kaiser was going to be a mess, so that much isn't a surprise. But I wasn't expecting it to be pure CGI. There's not a single frame of suit footage there, and I wouldn't be surprised if a suit just flat-out doesn't exist because it's such a cluster.

Which is an interesting direction to go with mecha design. Last year's RyuuTei KyuuRenOh (the first 11 Voyagers combined) was the king of all clusters; it was the primary robo standing on a purple parade float and it couldn't really move. Which made it simultaneously the perfect combination of static and uninventive/uninspired. Cluster Kaiser, on the other hand, is at least dynamic. It still doesn't look too great because it's a 9 part combination with parts randomly plugged in all over the place, but it's still one robo and it looks cool in motion.

What makes it work is that the CGI is so good. It's still not photorealistic, but it's the same kind of quality we saw back in episode 2 with that impossible transition between CGI and suit Lupin Kaiser. Toei's clearly been playing with their CGI process some - and in retrospect I feel like last year's Kyouryuuger Brave was intended to be their experiment - but it's paying off here. Their lighting system is massively better, and I suspect they may be using physically based rendering here to get these results. It's still fake and I hope this doesn't mean suits are going by the wayside, but it's now reaching a point where it's not blindingly obvious that it's fake. And that's a lot of progress.

TypicalStandUser does make a good point though that I wonder how much this costs them. CGI costs tend to scale with quality; despite the tech improvements, it's mostly just allowed you to spend more to get better quality, rather than the same quality at a lower price. They probably won't be trotting this formation out every episode, but I hope it isn't something that's so expensive we only see it a couple of times.

(I also wonder just how much of a cluster the toy version will be. That ends up being worse than the show. I just got the new Soul of Chogokin Dragon Caesar/Dragonzord. It's amazingly show accurate, however I forgot just how much of a cluster the 6 piece combination was. It's a massive set of metal shoulder pads )

If I have any disappointments, it's that the Status Gold mystery wasn't much of a mystery. The code just being longer makes sense for a safe - using 2 codebreakers less so - but it's also very straightforward. I was hoping for there to be more meaning to it. Though I suppose we still need to find out how one gets a gold safe and why (e.g. why doesn't everyone just have one?).

I also thought it interesting that Raimon's collection piece "doesn't work on" the Iceman. Which assuming the nuance on the translation is correct here, means that freezer-boy could inflict wounds upon Raimon that he couldn't heal from. So what kind of power does Frosty have such that it overrides a collection piece in such an important manner?

I like the fact that Status Gold's code was just longer and didn't require a new thing to break it unlike Build with a new gadget. Sometimes you don't need more meaning and Status Gold is just one of them. It's obvious it's a badge of higher status and the more of them you have, the higher up you are.

As for Zamigo able to negate Raimon's collection piece, I just assume he's just able to freeze him for good as along he doesn't break him into a million pieces.

I really want to believe that Tsukasa is onto them. I mean, this is twice Kairi has said arigachu~ in front of her and both times she looks at him weird.

So Noël also wants to revive someone... This means one of two things: either the legend is true, or Kogure fooled him too. Kinda hoping on the latter. Not everything has to have a happy ending you know.

This Week's Lupin CollectionShow

Name: Docteur, docteur/Doctor, Doctor

Power: Self-healing

Resemblance: The left half (right of the picture) of the Twin Brace, the two-piece transformation device from Choujuu Sentai Liveman

(I have relegated my duty to give just simple data and pretty pictures to look at, and maybe a joke or two if I can come up with something clever)

So, Cluster King aside, which yes the cg fight was nice...
This Episode Raised a Question for me:
How many Lupin Collection Pieces so far have been bracelets? I wonder if they will be "remade" for possible super modes/power ups? be nice if everyone got power ups since they seem to be either "Red exclusive" or "Exclusively Red used" in the past few years.

But hey too! It makes sense for Patranger to let the Thieves do their thing in taking the collection pieces since it DOES weaken the monster. Theyre just realizing this.

BUT MORE OVER, how would Noel have been able to program a new Dial Fighter to break Status Gold, if he doesnt know why the current Dial Fighters cant? Still wondering about that Blimp/sub though ...

Let me just put this out right now, it's definitely not "Good Cool Kaiser". Let's break this down:

グッドクル guddokuru
グッド good (guddo)
クール cool (kuuru)

Now, while クル and クール look almost the same, that elongated syllable makes all the difference. A native Japanese speaker would never use the shorter kuru instead of kuuru when trying to say "cool".

The name is a pun on グッとくる (guttokuru), which is Goody's catchphrase. I've been translating it as "Good Feeling" although honestly that's a bit of a simplification solely for the subs. The dictionary definition is "to touch emotionally; to feel something; to strike home". TBH now that I'm thinking about it, I probably should have translated his catchphrase as "all of the feels!" although I dislike using modern slang that might pass out of favor in a few years. It's a very emotionally charged phrase, so while "Good Feeling" isn't the best, it uses the word "good" and it gives you a general idea of the nuance, although we've lost the pun.

tl;dr you can't read クル (kuru) as "cool" and it's a pun so "Good Cool" is a mistranslation

It'd probably help if they didn't write everything in katakana, the kuru should really have been in hiragana since it's part of a Japanese phrase. Good Feeling works well since it aligns with Goody's character trait of inserting the word "good" in everything.

Rated 5 for the hilariousness of Kei-chan's bickering with LupinRed (Kairi) never ceased to amuse me and the awesomeness of VSX Robo (It does remind me of Chou Chou TOQ Dai-Oh). I also liked the idea that they really cooperate rather than fighting each other. Although I really wished this happened in episode 18. Dogranio's starting to have doubt about retiring is something to be look forward too since his nephew (Raimon) perhaps and all the other candidates keep failing, die and on top of that, their collection pieces were stolen.

This time, the Pats take note (more seriously perhaps) about Zamigo rather than ignoring him like in Episode 10. Since Lupins learn that Raimon was tough for them to handle alone, maybe they might or desperately need to seek help from Pats to defeat Zamigo rather than being selfishly handling them on their own (initially when getting to deal Zamigo after founding him). Since Zamigo is way stronger than Raimon, it obviously make me wonder what his latent skills are and if he didn't murdered those people with his Collections, what Collection pieces (in reference to which Sentai team's item) he had and when he used them for. All we saw earlier in episode 10 is that he creates unlimited ice revolvers from his safe and we don't even see the content inside them. But for Noel to have the same goal like the Lupins is totally suspicious because he does not sound serious with his talking despite his actions are.

The downer part of this episode is that the Pats still used Biker Boost to finish off a strong enemy rather than started using Crane/Drill Boost. Maybe they got no idea for what the CGI Crane/Drill Boost finisher is despite the toy having some sound for it or end up in budget constraint to create that because of VSX Robo debut.

On the other hand, Tsukasa really did observed and realised LupinRed saying Arigachu, twice probably and the first one wasn't shown since she was doing off screen, which is Kairi's catchphrase of saying Thank you. Tsukasa definitely will share this with everyone sans Noel in the next episode or later about doubting the Jurer workers of being Lupins, and/or perhaps secretly observe more until the Lupins let their guard down for them to confront the true identities (probably happen when the Lupins are dealing with Zamigo) before sharing her survey results. Oh la la, Kairi-kun, you really started to give it away your group identities with your Arigachu. But since which episode did the Pats heard Kairi said that?

SpoilerShow

For real? They really like putting CycloneJoker (LupinKaiser CycloneKnight) combo again rather LunaTrigger (PatKaiser StrongBiker) combo. That's the third time already appearing in the series. Talk about PatRangers getting outdated/got offset by two screen time and I don't know how much. Speaking of getting outdated, most of the new catalogue only showed power ups for LupinRed and X particularly (because apparently the SirenStriker is for X rather than Pats). TBH, I feel disappointed in this series screentime distribution apart from the stories being good for most episodes